Nicola Aloisi, Gumshoe
by nathan-p
Summary: My name is Fang, and I think something is very wrong here in Undisclosed. I have reason to suspect that one of my classmates, Max, is being abused at home. It's starting to seem like there's a conspiracy surrounding my dad, her dad, and actually, a bunch of people here. And it's up to me to find out what's going on... (AU, eventual Fax)
1. Chapter 1

This whole thing happened because I sat next to a girl in English class.

I didn't want to draw attention to myself, so I sat in the back left corner next to a window. Maybe I could escape notice from back here.

I sunk down in my chair and pretended extreme interest in the flagpole, from which the flag hung at half-mast. It was hot as hell, even though it was September, and as soon as I got out of school I was going to take my shirt off and go sulk in the open space out behind my house.

The teacher hurried in, blonde hair captured in a neat bun at the nape of her neck. She was fairly young, and spared a smile for us as she dropped her purse and several binders on the desk up front.

She flipped through the binder on top of the stack, then let it lay open on the desk and turned to the whiteboard. She was left-handed, and her handwriting was very neat.

She turned back to face us and capped the marker. "Hello, class. I'm Miss Walker and I'll be your English teacher this year. I hope you're all in the right room."

I'd showed up early specifically to be sure I could find all my classes, like the dork I was.

"Let me just call roll and I'll pass out your syllabus for the year." She smiled and picked up her binder.

"Nicola? Nicola Aloisi?"

I stuck my hand up in the air. She'd mispronounced my last name, but pretty much everyone did. "Here. Call me Nick."

"Nick? Okay."

To be honest, nobody was staring at me, but it felt like the whole class was, and I looked out the window, trying to seem all James Dean-like and mysterious rather than embarrassed. Every year. Every year I had to correct people about my name.

Why couldn't my dad just have named me Leonard or something? I didn't care if it was a family name. After a hundred years settled in the Great Plains, we were about as Italian as pizza pie.

I wasn't really paying attention for the rest of roll, until (of course) the girl next to me answered. She was good-looking, in that particular way you see in small towns in the West - strong bones, kind eyes, her hair pulled back tight. And, of course, she wore a plaid flannel shirt and jeans.

I missed most of her answer being an awkward nerd creeping on the girl next to me, but I heard her first name loud and clear when she corrected Miss Walker.

"Max," she said her name was. I could like that. We could start a "cursed with strange names" club. God, I was so lonely back then.

And for whatever reason, I didn't just forget about her when the bell rang. She interested me. What was with the name? Why was she so attached to the corner seat? And why did her fashion sense match mine?

I had a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers - but then again, such is life.

So I was curious about this new girl. And I had time on my hands, more than enough to get to know her.

What I didn't know at this point was that there was, indeed, much more than met the eye to Max, and that while we both liked hiking (as I was soon to find out) most of my afternoons were going to be spent chasing leads in dusty libraries or learning to use microfiche.

But that was all in the future at this point. I didn't know her reputation. I hadn't met the people she'd been friends with. I hadn't tracked her family's history.

I hadn't met her father yet.

Even then, though - I had a hunch. Just a vague idea. Maybe it was intuition.

Something was not only different about Max, but _wrong_.

* * *

><p>I'd like to stop for just a minute and tell you something before I get any further: I can't tell you everything that happened, as much as I'd like to.<p>

See, once the ball got rolling, this whole ball of weirdness and tragedy snowballed larger and larger, until people who had never been involved, people like Max's mom and little brother, got drawn into the storm of strangeness and government attention. It was a bad time, and I waited until now to spill my story because I didn't want to stir the whole feeding frenzy back to life.

If you really want to know everything, it's not as if Itexicon ever cared enough to _completely _bury what happened - and if you look in the right places, the whole story is, as far as I know, still just floating around.

That said:

This all happened when I was a junior in high school, in a little town in the West that I'm going to call Undisclosed...


	2. Chapter 2

When I need to think, I go for a hike. No real reason, except that there's generally no one around, so that I'm free to think out loud if I want. And hey, when your house backs up to acres of absolutely nothing, you should put some kind of use to it.

I wasn't there to think, though. I'd started out with the intention of avoiding that as much as I could - I wanted to go out and run around in the September heat until I sweated my brains out.

Instead I'd wound up crouched panting under a ponderosa pine and thinking anyway - best laid plans and all.

I had a crush and I had it bad.

I'd only known Max for two weeks, seen her less times than I had fingers, talked to her maybe twice, but brother, I'd fallen head over heels.

She wasn't super-pretty, didn't wear makeup that I noticed, always wore her long hair in a braid, but for some reason she was the prettiest thing in school to me. I kept my eyes to myself for the most part, but despite myself I still sometimes found them wandering over to glance at her paper or the sleeve of her shirt. Anything but direct eye contact, you know?

I was starting to get curious about her, too - how could I get her to talk to me? So far the only words I'd heard her say to me were a surly good morning and a "take one, pass it on" as she handed me a copy of our assignment.

I'd heard her talk to other people a little, here and there, but never very much. Which suggested to me that maybe, like me, she didn't like talking.

As you can see, I wasn't exactly at the top of my intellectual game at that point in time. I had yet to begin my crash course in investigation and deduction, though, and irrational crushes have a tendency to destroy rationality anyway.

If she wouldn't talk to me, I could probably find out more about her by talking to people who knew her. Having just moved to town, and the town being relatively small, that couldn't be too hard.

Most of the people I'd seen Max talk to I didn't know at all, or recognize. But three of them, I did - so I'd begin my asking around with them.

(Later, I'd come to know all of them better, and return to them for more information and connections. But that's still in the future at this point. Bear with me.)

One was actually my neighbor - a bubbly sophomore named Monique. She'd come over my first day in town with a plate of cookies, and man, could she talk. I figured if there was anyone who'd know what Max liked to talk about, it would be her.

One of the others was a more tenuous connection - a tall drink of water named, believe it or not, James Kirk. Who went by Jim. He and I were in the same math class, although he seemed incredibly bored most of the time. I knew for a fact that he and Max had at least science class together - AP Chemistry - and from overhearing their conversations, I was pretty sure they were lab partners.

I don't know about your science classes, but in mine, by the end of the year I knew my lab partner almost as well as I knew myself. Maybe better, given that I was a confused knot of problems at that point in time.

My last option might be hard to approach, but he seemed to know Max best of the three. I saw them together at lunch all the time, chatting over mystery meat, and from the paint splatters I guessed they shared an art class. I was reasonably certain his name was Dylan but couldn't be a hundred percent sure since I didn't share any classes myself with him - unless you count home room.

I admit, there was probably an element of creeping in all this investigation. It would've been simpler, I knew full well, to just talk to the girl and stumble my way through by myself.

But I was raised a planner, and as it turned out, laying the groundwork by getting to know those who knew her did turn out to benefit me in the long run.

Maybe my subconscious was onto something even then.

* * *

><p>Preemptive strike for any questions: Yes, I'm a college student, but my graduation from high school was in the recent past and I have a sibling currently in high school. However, if I fuck up any current trends you see, please let me know.<p>

Yes, I'm a dude. No, I haven't extensively creeped someone I was romantically interested in. But I have known people who did - what else is a Facebook stalk session for?

No, I'm not straight. I'm not super-gay though either, and I did have a girlfriend for part of high school.

Yes, chapters will be short. I'm dumb and decided to take summer classes. However, I don't intend to give up on this fic. I've had notes for it going for at least half a year, and I intend to finish what I start here.

Yes, I will answer any questions you have about the story, unless they'll be answered in future chapters. I will not tell you the ending or any future pairings, but I will happily tell you, say, how old Max, Fang, Iggy, and Dylan are.

Anyway. Hopefully you're enjoying this story so far. And beginning with this chapter, I want to know what you think will happen. I have my plans, but I wanna know if all my super-subtle intimations of plot to come are coming through.

Holy hell that's a lot of words. But I will refrain from repeating any of this in the future.


	3. Chapter 3

I wanted to talk to Monique first, since she seemed friendliest, and my lonely childhood of mystery novels told me she'd know the most about where to start my investigating.

Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.

I wound up talking to Dylan first, for the simple reason that Max didn't show up to school that day. She wasn't in English lurking at my elbow, and I didn't see her walking with Jim from the science classrooms.

When she didn't show for lunch I was hardly surprised.

I'm not the dastardly planning type - I liked seeing her, even though I still hadn't said a damn thing to her. She never said anything to me, but I guess I enjoyed just having her around.

That's probably really creepy.

Dylan was alone at the table they usually occupied, book open on the table in front of him and a tray of "food" at his hand.

I approached.

"Dylan. Hi."

He looked up from his textbook. "Nick."

"Can I sit here?"

He shrugged and forked a bite of fried mystery meat into his mouth, light flashing off the thin metal band he wore on his ring finger.

I should explain something else here: no one I knew was exactly an open book. I knew very little about almost everyone I knew. I just didn't happen to have a crush on most of them.

Take Dylan, for example. He was fairly handsome, I could see that, but I didn't give a flying fuck about his deep secrets, or why he wore a ring. (Current scuttlebutt, however, was that he was secretly carrying a torch for some unknown person and that they had given him the ring. Or maybe that he was just weird. No one could ever quite agree.)

I set my tray down on the table across from him. I'd also picked up the mystery meat, but I didn't really intend to eat it.

"You know Max, right?"

I've never been known for subtlety.

He gave me a curious look. "Yeah. Why?"

I leaned forward. "Tell me about her."

"She says she's in your English class," he said curtly. "Talk to her. Not me."

He got up and left.

I thought, then, that maybe he was just a dick. But I also had a little feeling that this had just taken a left turn into the land of the needlessly complex and horrifyingly revealing.

Now, at that time I hadn't read H. P. Lovecraft, which Jim was to introduce me to not too long from then. Thus, I couldn't make the ironic and almost truthful comparison of me to the poor bastard who always takes a wrong turn somewhere and ends up surrounded by eldritch horrors.

I'm not saying that anyone was part fish in that town, or that the cats possessed some kind of weird hivemind intelligence. But strange things were going on under the surface, that was for sure.

I wanted to know what kind of things.

And therein lay my eventual doom.

* * *

><p>Note: Here we meet one of my favorite MR characters: monsieur Dylan.<p>

Place the Lovecraft references, receive my happiness.

My thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far: mickeymac, JealousMindsThinkAlike, FlockLuver2314, Serenity Jones, MaximumRideFanAddict, and fanglover101, you flatter me.


	4. Chapter 4

I met him at the grocery store. It wasn't part of my plan - you're not supposed to meet someone's parents until you've already started dating - but as I was discovering, my plans didn't seem to figure at all in what actually happened.

My dad was out of town for the week, which left me alone in the house. He'd left money for groceries, and like a good kid, that's what I was spending the money on.

Well, maybe some of my groceries were Lucky Charms, not the bread and milk he'd intended the money for, but still. I wasn't the party-throwing type - it's kind of difficult when you don't know anyone to invite.

I had sixteen items, one too many to go through the self-check lane, and like a good citizen I went to the only open checkout lane with a cashier instead.

Where, of course, I found myself stuck behind two families, both with carts full of food.

I rolled my eyes and wished I knew someone to pass the time texting with.

"Excuse me."

I must've only heard him the second time, because when I turned to face the voice, he looked faintly irritated.

"Are you Nick?" He had a soft tenor voice; as I would learn later, he was pretty much incapable of raising his voice to anyone.

"Yes, I am." I switched my basket to my left arm and reached out to shake his hand.

"Frank's son, right?" His eyes were curious; blue, hidden behind square, wire-framed glasses. He had one of those faces that always looks somewhat sad; Max did not, but I could see the similarity in their bone structure.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm Jeb Batchelder," he said. "Your father and I used to work together. Good to see you back in town."

"Nice to be here." Dad had never mentioned the place before. Maybe I had some questions to ask him.

He smiled. "Max told me about you. You're in the same class, aren't you?"

"Yeah," I muttered. "English." The first family had finished and the second was halfway through their cart of soda, chips, meat... Jesus, how much food did one family need?

He nodded.

"Next, please."

I put down my groceries, and believe me, I was glad to have that conversation cut off.

* * *

><p>It was getting towards October, so you'd expect cold weather - and you'd be wrong. We had a heat wave at the beginning of the month, and most of the student body was okay with that. Any excuse to keep dressing like August.<p>

This was the first strange thing I noticed about Max herself: she kept the plaid flannel. She and some of the goth kids were the only ones sweating in heavy clothes; everyone else from scene to cheerleader was back in summer clothes.

Maybe she didn't like wearing other clothes. Maybe she was comfortable in those clothes.

But I remembered it later; one more piece in the puzzle.


	5. Chapter 5

I did not ask my dad for information about his mysterious weirdo coworker.

I didn't ask any of my classmates about Max's dad, or about Max, for that matter.

I didn't work up the nerve to go actually talk to Max instead of being a gormless creepy idiot.

For the most part I spent fall break that year sulking in the open space behind my house, pretending I was on a hike and avoiding human contact. On the rare occasion I ventured out into society, either I was sleeping or "hanging out" at Starbucks because one of the baristas was cute and took pity on me.

It was on one of these occasions that what an actual detective might call a "lead" pretty much fell into my lap.

I was occupying an armchair at Starbucks, nursing something with a stupid name and way too little actual coffee content, and contemplating whether I could get away with ditching off into the scrub for another few hours. In retrospect I was probably driving away clientele with more money to spend just by angsting all over the furniture, but at the time I didn't care.

One such shining example of humanity (a business type in a suit and the ugliest argyle socks I had ever seen) finally decided he'd had enough coffee and lurking teenagers for one day and departed, leaving his newspaper behind.

Out of sheer soul-destroying boredom, I swiped it. My dad took the New York Times, but I rarely ever read it. At least the local paper promised some comics and maybe some letters to the editor stupid enough to laugh at.

Or, you know, a news story about a local who'd gotten released from prison.

Normally that's not exactly headline news, but in these parts... well, it's still not, and the story ran in the "human interest" section of the paper with the comics and stories about kittens getting rescued from trees. It's just a perpetually slow news day around here, is what I'm saying.

(This was one of many things I should have picked up on before I did. Nothing ever happened. A couple minor drug busts, house fires in the summertime, mountain lions wandering down from the foothills, but never a murder or a domestic abuse case. Nothing.)

I didn't recognize the name, and what he'd been imprisoned for wasn't mentioned in the article. He'd gotten out early for good behavior, blah blah blah.

The thing that interested me was that he was mentioned as having worked for someplace local before he was arrested and convicted of... whatever he'd done. Someplace with a name I recognized; I'd seen it before.

For once slightly motivated, I tucked the newspaper under my arm, grabbed my "coffee", and went home.

The bike ride blurred by: I was on a mission. I shoved my bike against the wall of the garage and bolted inside. I thought I knew what I was looking for, and I had a good idea where it would be.

We'd been living in this house for maybe three months, and we still weren't all the way unpacked. But my dad had insisted that we unpack all of the stuff that went in his "study", and he'd made me do most of the work. I didn't know one person could have so many boxes of books.

I technically wasn't supposed to go in Dad's study when he wasn't there, but I figured as long as I put everything back where it was I'd be fine.

I have a good visual memory, I won't lie, and as I crept in the door, I knew exactly which shelf I had put the book I was looking for on.

Of course, this meant it wasn't there, and I had to search every shelf for it, hyperaware of every sound as I anticipated Dad coming home (which was stupid, given it was half-past one in the afternoon).

Eventually I found it - bound in brown leather, with no title on the spine, but a faint inscription on the front cover in worn gold relief - and cracked it open, already suspicious of what I'd find.

Yep. In the page that showed every employee for that year - the year before I was born - my dad was right next to the ex-con, one arm around the guy's shoulder and a laughing smile on his face. Max's father was in the next row, in the quietly-looming pose to which tall people are so often relegated in group photos.

I turned back to the title page and frowned.

_Itexicon Employee Yearbook, 1992_.

Why did I know that name?


End file.
